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didn't think his joking had any sexual overtones. For another thing, she used to do terrific work-something must be wrong. So he calls her in and finds out that Nora is having a terrible time with her six-year-old in school and her three-year-old's day-care situation is awful; her ex-husband is trying to get custody, and the school and day-care problems play right into his hands. In other words, her life's a mess-and the very worst thing that could happen right now is to lose her job.

He talks about Nora to a friend from school who has a managerial job in the same city. The friend tells him to fire her-she isn't doing the work, and Pete doesn't have the right to turn the company into a charitable organization for people with screwed-up lives. He was hired as a manager, not a clergyman. But Pete can't bring himself to fire her. Instead he works late, going over Nora's workload and finding ways to redistribute it, to take up the slack-in essence, he ends up doing her job.

If this were a love story, you'd develop a romance between Pete and Nora. But that idea bores you. So you have Nora react nastily to Pete's "intrusions" into her office domain, not realizing that he's saving her bacon; she even complains about Pete to the people above him. He can't even tell them what he's doing-they'd be appalled if they knew he had done her job for her instead of staying in the role of a manager. After five months of Nora sniping at Pete while he covers for her, she finally gets her kids' problems straightened out, her husband off her back, and her life back in gear. Naturally, Pete reassigns to Nora all the work he had removed from her during her hard times. Nora, however, is outraged at a sudden doubling of her workload with no commensurate rise in salary. She quits-after writing nasty letters complaining about Pete to the people over him.

Maybe that's the end of your story; maybe it's just one incident along the way, with other plot threads weaving through the story. What matters is that it establishes that, while Pete is definitely a common man, there is also something uncommon about him-even heroic. He is able to empathize even with people who aren't nice to him. He is, in fact, a noble figure.

Sure, he gets so furious at Nora that he writes out her dismissal notice a half-dozen times before she finally quits. When she's gone, after doing real damage to his career when his only "crime" was helping hold her life together, he vows that he'll never be such a sucker again. These are all common, natural, ordinary reactions. But the audience knows that when it comes right down to it, Pete will do it again, over and over. He won't have a Lee Iacocca career-but the audience is in awe of him for a virtue he doesn't even value himself.

Searching for the extraordinary in your characters can help you write your story. More important, though, it will help your readers find what they're looking for in fiction. You won't please everybody. Some readers will reject your story because your hero isn't heroic enough for them to bother with; others because you made him too heroic for them to believe. That will always happen, and there's nothing you can do about it.

What you can do is search for what is "larger than life" in your characters and then make sure that your story reveals their nobility, their grandeur, however subtle and well-disguised it may be amid realistic and common details.

CHAPTER 10

The COMIC CHARACTER: CONTROLLED

DISBELIEF

LAST NIGHT I WATCHED REX REED'S REVIEW of Rob Reiner's film The Princess Bride. I usually disagree with everything Reed says, which is half the fun of watching him. One comment he made in this review was worth remembering. He said that Reiner's idea of creating a comic character was to give him a funny accent-and for Reed, that just wasn't enough. A wizard who talks like a New York Jew? Who can believe that?

Reed was right in principle. Using the wrong accent can destroy the believability of a character. I think immediately of the movie Tess, in which an otherwise powerful performance by Nastassia Kinski was deeply marred by an accent that made it impossible for me to believe her as a Wessex girl. In other films her accent hasn't been a problem, but Tess was an adaptation from Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and in Hardy's works the Wessex milieu is so important that to be false to it is to be false to the story. To me it was a serious flaw in a movie that reached for greatness.

If Kinski's accent had been right for Wessex, I would not have noticed her speech at all. Because her accent was wrong, it weakened my belief and marred the movie. But in The Princess Bride, I thought Miracle Max's New York Jewish accent, dead wrong for the Romantic medieval milieu, was wonderfully funny.

What's the difference?

Comic characters cannot be believable in the same way that other characters are. They can't be unbelievable, either. But comedy almost always deals with pain, and comic characters almost always suffer. If we believed in them with the same intensity we bring to straight characters, their pain would be unbearable. Instead, the author gives the audience clues that the character is not to be taken seriously. Something is made deliberately "wrong" about the character, so that we know we aren't supposed to react with sympathy. Instead we're supposed to laugh.

That's what Miracle Max's accent helps to do. There's no way he could have a New York Jewish accent. We instantly recognize that he's wrong, out of place in the story. Yet he is exactly what we need: The hero of the story has just been killed, and we're hungry for relief. Max lifts up the hero's arm, lets it drop limply to the table, and says, in his impossible

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accent, "I've seen worse." We laugh because of the wrongness of his response.

At the same time, because this is a Romance, we hope that Miracle Max's name is for real. We want him to be able to resurrect the hero. Max's magical powers are not a joke-they are important, and within the context of the story, they are believable. Max's Jewish accent, being false, makes him comic; his magical power makes him important.

The problem is that the audience still has to believe in and care about comic characters. The goal of the comedy writer isn't doubt, but rather controlled disbelief. Characters must be believable enough that the audience will say, "Yes! Isn't that the truth! Isn't that what always happens! I've known people like that! That's exactly what always happens to me!" Yet the same characters must be unbelievable enough that the audience doesn't feel obliged to empathize with them. The characters must constantly give the audience permission to laugh at their misfortunes.

That's why comedy is so much harder to write well than straight fiction. The comedy writer always walks a delicate line between being too believable, and therefore not funny, and being too unbelievable, and therefore losing the audience's interest.

Remember that comic characters appear even in the most serious works, and that even the most serious characters have comic moments. And when you introduce a comic character into a story that must be utterly believable, the fragile balance of controlled disbelief becomes even more important.

Here are some of the devices we use to signal the audience that it's all right to laugh:

DOING A "TAKE"

The simplest way of signaling comic unbelievability is to talk directly to the audience. In non-comic fiction it has long been out of fashion to write passages directly to the "dear reader," and in non-comic film and television, while we accept the convention of an occasional narrator who speaks to the audience, we don't expect a character to do so. Comedy, however, constantly breaks that convention. Woody Alien has his comic characters speak to the audience in film after film, using both voice-over narration and on-screen comments. On TV, Dobie Gillis spoke to the audience-but only when he was alone on screen. In the action comedy Moonlighting, every episode has at least one moment when one character reminds another of the fact that they're on a television show with an audience watching ("Why are we stopping here?" "It's time for a commercial.") For me, this device is too heavy-handed-it has crossed the line so far that it makes it hard for me to take the serious aspects of the show seriously; for many other viewers, however, it's the highlight of the show.

You can have direct contact with the audience without actually speaking to them. At one point in Beverly Hills Cop-an action movie that depends on our taking pain and jeopardy very seriously at times-there is a moment when Eddie Murphy is told something that strikes him as outra-

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geous, whereupon he turns and looks straight into the camera with no expression at all on his face. He holds that connection for a single beat, not even a second, and then goes on. But the audience laughs in delight. Murphy's momentary awareness of the camera is not enough to destroy the audience's belief in the story, but it is a good comic signal not to take everything too seriously.

This is called a "take," a straight-to-the-audience reaction. The late comedian Jack Benny was the master of the take. Sometimes it seemed like he could stretch a take forever, earning laugh after laugh without saying a word. How did it work? Another character would say something outrageous, something that was either so dumb or so wrong or so rude that it would take a thousand words to answer. But Benny said nothing at all. Instead, he folded his arms and looked at the audience-a long, lingering look, with a disgusted expression on his face. Finally he turned back to look at the person who said the outrageous thing-but still couldn't answer. So again he would look at the audience. Sometimes, in despair, he would say, "Well." The audience would roar with laughter again and again during the take. I never saw it fail.

But Jack Benny was doing it in front of a live audience. How does a fiction writer do a take? One way is to insert comments to the reader. Kurt Vonnegut used to do it all the time. He'd pick a phrase like "so it goes" or "hi ho" and interject it repeatedly after something awful happened in the story. It provided exactly the same degree of controlled disbelief as Jack Benny folding his arms and looking at the audience or Eddie Murphy doing his deadpan take and then turning back to the action.

You can do it less flamboyantly than Vonnegut, of course. It can be done with a fillip of attitude:

I yelled at the cat, kicked at it-finally it dropped the squirrel and took refuge on the neighbor's porch. The baby squirrel just lay there, trembling, but it didn't seem to be hurt. No blood, anyway, and as I reached down it took a few steps, so nothing was broken. I picked it up and carried it back to the tree, feeling like a hero for saving its life. Of course it bit my hand.

The paragraph ends with the narrator in pain. But the "of course" is a take-the narrator is looking at the audience with a mixture of disgust and resignation. You might as well give up on gratitude cause you ain't gonna get it, says that of course. It's a way of putting some distance between the audience and the pain.

We can do the same thing without a word.

1 yelled at the cat, kicked at it-finally it dropped the squirrel and took refuge on the neighbor's porch. The baby squirrel just lay there, trembling, but it didn't seem to be hurt. No blood, anyway, and as I reached down it took a few steps, so nothing was broken. I picked it up and carried it back to the tree, feeling like a hero for saving its life. It bit my hand.

The paragraph break emphasizes the next sentence, calls attention to it, makes you pause just a beat to digest it. It's a take.

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EXAGGERATION

Let's continue the story:

... I picked it up and carried it back to the tree, feeling like a hero for saving its life. It bit my hand.

I put a bandage on the wound, but it got infected anyway. When my hand turned brown and got to the size of a boxing glove, I went to the doctor. He injected a quart of penicillin into my backside even though we both agreed that the problem was in my hand. As I left, he gave me several brochures about various brands of artificial arm. "You might want to look these over and decide which you like best," he said, "just in case you don't get lockjaw and die hideously."

I promised him that next time I'd take animal bites more seriously. I also

made a firm resolution to look for every opportunity to feed baby squirrels to

cats.

It is true that leaving an animal bite untreated could lead to gangrene, tetanus, or even rabies. But as you read this passage, you didn't for a moment believe that the narrator was really on the verge of losing his hand. Nor did you believe that his hand was really the size of a boxing glove, or that the narrator would actually catch baby squirrels and feed them to cats. The remark about squirrels was an exaggeration of his chagrin at how his kindness to animals turned out.

Note, though, that in this version the narrator does not do a take, or give any other sign to the reader that he thinks this passage is funny. A vital principle of comic writing is not to laugh at your own humor-not to give a sign that either the author or the characters are amused at their own clever wit. It would have been deadly if the doctor's exaggerations, instead of being delivered deadpan, had been reported like this:

"You might want to look these over and decide which you like best," he joked, "just in case you don't get lockjaw and die hideously." He giggled insanely as I left.

Now, I can't be sure that you thought the first version was particularly amusing, but I do know that this version is considerably less funny. This time the narrator tells us the doctor was joking, which spoils the fun of figuring out that the narrator is exaggerating. And the line about giggling insanely carries exaggeration too far. The writer is trying too hard, the disbelief is out of control, and both the humor and the story are dead in the water.

DOWNPLAYING

The reverse of exaggeration is for a character to downplay the importance of her problems. Imagine a comic character being held at knifepoint by a vicious enemy-not usually a funny situation.